In New Zealand, the kiwifruit industry is dominated by ZESPRI, the single-desk marketer and exporter of New Zealand’s kiwifruit. Rather than rewarding high productivity, the Taste Zespri program rewards high dry-matter fruit. It is very consumer focused. All export fruit from the more than 2000 kiwifruit growers has to meet the requirements of the GlobalGAP (formerly EurepGAP) audit system (in which GAP stands for good agricultural practices) and growers of organic fruit are certified by BioGro. To quote from the GlobalGAP web site (<www.globalgap.org>): ‘The GlobalGAP standard is primarily designed to reassure consumers about how food is produced on the farm by minimising detrimental environmental impacts of farming operations, reducing the use of chemical inputs and ensuring a responsible approach to worker health and safety.’

GlobalGAP and BioGro carry out a process of certification of a product from farm inputs and all on-farm practices until it leaves the farm. Once certified, a farm is audited annually.

To indicate the degree of the issue this chapter is describing, I provide here some of the relevant demographic details of kiwifruit orchardists in New Zealand. The average age of green orchardists was fifty-nine years, fifty-six for gold and fifty-eight for organic in 2006 (Fairweather et al. 2007:18); about 80 per cent lived on their orchard (Fairweather et al. 2007:18; Colmar Brunton 2007); 65 per cent were in households with no children; 72 per cent of orchards were owned and operated by the orchardist and his/her partner; and 83 per cent of orchardists were male (Colmar Brunton 2007). In 2006, 23 per cent said that they would be retired or have the orchard leased or managed within the next five years (Fairweather et al. 2007:21). All of these figures demonstrate the predominance of older orchardists in the kiwifruit industry.